The present invention relates to a device for measuring the rate exposed to deleterious materials corresponding to an amount of physical labor in working environments in which physical labor in the field of the social medical science is performed.
Recently, the materials in the air detrimental to health, such as particle dust, organic solvent, and fiber dust of asbestos, have become an object of public concern. Particularly in working environments of high concentration of such deleterious materials, laborers work while being exposed to these deleterious materials. The steady improvement of such working environments has been made by measuring the rate of exposed to the deleterious materials, which rate corresponds to an amount of his labor. Socially this is of great importance.
The physiology clearly describes that the larger the physical load is, the higher a heart rate of a man is, and this is due to the fact that an increase of physical load increases his respiration rate. To make the improvement, therefore, it is required to set up standards of the tolerable concentrations of the deleterious materials in the working environments, and to constantly supervise the concentrations of the materials. In this case, the actual tolerable concentrations of the materials must be set to be somewhat lower than those specified by the standards with respect to environment where labor with large physical load is performed. This is true socially and economically.
A conventional methodology to measure the rate exposed to such harmful materials collects two types of data, living organism data and ambient condition data by individual measuring instruments. The living organism data contain heart rate, respiration rate, amounts of physical labor, and the like. The ambient condition data contain temperature, humidity, and concentrations of harmful materials in the atmosphere. The collected data are statistically analyzed for determining the rate exposed to the deleterious materials.
The above approach, however, necessitates the increased size of measuring instruments, and consequently limited applications of the resultant instruments, viz., limits the use of the instruments only in indoor work. Advantage of the approach is high measuring precision. Disadvantages reside in that it is very difficult to synchronously follow instantaneously changing working environments, and that mistake in data processing is inevitable, and the measured data on the rate exposed to the deleterious materials is unsatisfactory in reliability. Further, the particle dust measuring instruments commercially available function only to measure the amount of particle dust, and fail to play a helpful role in the improvement of the working environment.
Particularly in working environments of broad space where a relatively heavy body work is done, for example, in outdoor work, the conventional measuring instruments are almost incapable of measuring the deleterious materials qualitatively or quantitatively.
Further, the conventional measuring instruments is lack of a variety of other important functions to be required in the measurement. For example, in the measurement of the deleterious materials, it should be avoided that use of the instruments disturbs or interrupts laborer's work. Nevertheless, when a respiration rate of a laborer is measured by the conventional instrument, he must stop his work for the measurement.